Fedora Asahi Remix 41 is out now bringing the most polished version of Linux for Apple Silicon Macs, along with support for AAA gaming. It's developed in collaboration between the Fedora Project and Asahi Linux.
As announced on the Fedora blog it's built upon Fedora 41 with the KDE Plasma 6.2 desktop environment as their flagship (best supported), but GNOME 47 is also an option for those that want it. The exciting thing about this release is the much improved gaming experience!
Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig from the Asahi team blogged about the big gaming improvements that I covered here on GamingOnLinux back in October, and this release brings it all together along with the new and improved conformant Vulkan 1.4 driver. Writing about the graphics driver upgrade developer Rosenzweig mentioned:
Releasing a conformant driver reflects our commitment to graphics standards and software freedom. Asahi Linux is also compatible with OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0, all conformant to the relevant specifications. For that matter, ours are the only conformant drivers on Apple hardware for any graphics standard.
Thanks to the likes of FEX and various other projects, you can run Steam games directly.
Installing it on an Apple Silicon Mac is surprisingly easy too, you just need access to a terminal and then run a simple command and it will walk you through it.
Pictured - The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Wonderful to see such insanely impressive progress for running Linux on modern Apple Silicon hardware.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
StalePopcorn 17 Dec 2024
R Daneel Olivaw 17 Dec 2024
da_habakuk 17 Dec 2024
im not sure how this will bring AAA gaming to linux on arm. most games are x86 only - what cpu translation is used to achieve this goal? opengl & vulkan is the easier part of the puzzle i think.... maybe im missing something?It uses a mixture of things like FEX to run the games on Arm. So yeah, you're missing plenty :)
In my opinion, Apple can never be be the future of gaming thanks to its 'walled garden' approach and because they change CPU architecture about as often as I change clothes. Many games that used to work don't any more because they were built for Intel Macs, and before that, PowerPCA walled garden is nothing to do with it, Steam supports Mac after all. Their lower user share is the biggest part of it, same reason as Linux.
As for changing CPU architecture, they moved to Intel starting in 2006, that's around 18 years ago. That's a long time.
Mountain Man 17 Dec 2024
In my opinion, Apple can never be be the future of gaming thanks to its 'walled garden' approach and because they change CPU architecture about as often as I change clothes. Many games that used to work don't any more because they were built for Intel Macs, and before that, PowerPCI think the real issue is that the majority of people buying Macs aren't buying them for gaming.
this f...ed gaming on Macs hard, because games are irreplaceable, and because they're software you usually release and forget, unlike utility/office/production/development software, which needs constant improvement so can be adjusted over years to new platform requirements and/or replaced by an equivalent software, as long as the software goals are still relevant
opensource devs have hacked away at this problem with MoltenVK (Vulkan > Metal) and that opened the doors to other solutions like Zink (OpenGL > Vulkan) to be used on Apple hardware
x86 emulation over ARM was also already an important task before Apple chose ARM for their new machines
so very essential pieces of the puzzle to reach Asahi Linux's current success now were slowly falling into place even before the M1 was born... and Apple was also already murdering gaming devs on their platform since before the change to Arm
which is not to say Asahi didn't deliver much... they did! Hardware enablement is *tough* work!!! Writing an entire GPU driver from scratch is crazy!!! Hitting fully conformant drivers this fast on a brand new driver is awesome!!! And stiching together all those pieces in a user-transparent manner is non-trivial to say the least!
Last edited by Marlock on 17 Dec 2024 at 11:53 pm UTC
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